If a picture is worth a thousand words, then 128 pages, wordless, graphical novel, The Arrival by Shaun Tan, would be an epic novel; not in size but in the creative genius of telling a story through drawing, it is an amazing feast. The imagination is un-parallel. I’m lost for words. Not because it’s a wordless novel, but rather – WOW. Tan captures all the alienations, the creepy, the shock, from a perspective of a migrant in his drawing. I couldn’t fathom an artist could have such vision. Amazing books.
The Arrival is a migrant story told as a series of wordless images that might seem to come from a long forgotten time. A man leaves his wife and child in an impoverished town, seeking better prospects in an unknown country on the other side of a vast ocean. He eventually finds himself in a bewildering city of foreign customs, peculiar animals, curious floating objects and indecipherable languages. With nothing more than a suitcase and a handful of currency, the immigrant must find a place to live, food to eat and some kind of gainful employment. He is helped along the way by sympathetic strangers, each carrying their own unspoken history: stories of struggle and survival in a world of incomprehensible violence, upheaval and hope.
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